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000264_rgilbert88@comcast.net_Fri Jan 1 17:31:10 2010.msg
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Path: reader1.panix.com!panix!usenet.stanford.edu!news.glorb.com!news2.glorb.com!Xl.tags.giganews.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!local2.nntp.dca.giganews.com!news.giganews.com.POSTED!not-for-mail
NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 30 Dec 2009 23:22:59 -0600
Date: Thu, 31 Dec 2009 00:22:58 -0500
From: "Richard B. Gilbert" <rgilbert88@comcast.net>
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Subject: Re: Kermit on Itanium VMS
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Dennis Boone wrote:
> > After all these years I have a little difficulty imagining why anyone
> > would want to but given sufficient incentives it's possible to do it.
>
> Imagining it isn't so hard.
>
> One of the key things mickeysoft fails to understand is that _some_
> people do occasionally need to use old data. We had a textbook written
> 25 years ago using MacWord 1.0 that we needed to read. None of the
> Mac or Windows Words we could find would touch it. (IIRC, even the
> version of MacWord which followed 1.0 wouldn't.) None of the word
> processor format converters we could find would touch it. We ended up
> using Word 1.0 to extract the text, and were fortunate that a student
> around the office happened to have a very old Mac with that very old
> software installed.
>
> Archivists these days are trying to figure out how to prevent the
> last 40 years of data and documents from vanishing down the ratholes
> of history. They're faced with choices like doing one-shot conversions
> to flat text, hoping like hell that newer versions will read older
> documents, running old software on the ever decreasing collection of
> old hardware, or running it in emulation. Like any other endeavour,
> the working solution seems to be a hybrid.
>
> De
If the text or data is really that valuable you can print the text on
high quality (acid free) paper and copy the data to modern media. If
you can't read the original media, I can put you in touch with a guy who
makes his living reading weird, obsolete, or deteriorated media.
Keep in mind that Sturgeon's Law applies here. Sturgeon's Law is
"Ninety percent of everything is crud!" I'm inclined to believe that
Sturgeon's constant is far too optimistic; I think ninety-eight percent
is probably closer to being correct.